“If a man had nothing that was worth dying for, then he was not fit to live.”

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn’t as good as a white child.

Behind every good man, there’s a good woman reminding you I knew you when you didn’t have nothing.

Nonviolence first changes the individual.

We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.

Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.

When the heart is right, the mind and the body will follow.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

Lesbian and gay people are a permanent part of the American workforce, who currently have no protection from the arbitrary abuse of their rights on the job.

Nonviolence is a method that transforms, first of all, the individual once you understand it and embrace it. It begins with you and, if you can, about transforming individuals so that they love unconditionally.

Money is necessary — both to support a family and to advance causes one believes in.

I always knew that I was called to do something. I didn’t know what, but I finally rationalized after I met Martin [Luther King, Jr.] and it took a lot of praying to discover this, that this was probably what God had called me to do, to marry him.

Hate is too great a burden to bear.

When Good Friday comes, these are the moments in life when we feel there’s no hope. But then, Easter comes.

Women, in general, are not part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind.

If Martin [Luther King, Jr.]’s philosophy had been embraced and lived out in Iraq and other places, we wouldn’t have bin Ladens.

This time it is real – all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!

I don’t think anybody’s necessarily ready for death. You can only hope that when it approaches, you feel like you’ve said what you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out in mid-sentence.

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honor them as though still living.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.